Dave Swindle

David Swindle is the associate editor of PJ Media. He writes and edits articles and blog posts on politics, news, culture, religion, and entertainment. He edits the PJ Lifestyle section and the PJ columnists. Contact him at DaveSwindlePJM @ Gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @DaveSwindle.
He has worked full-time as a writer, editor, blogger, and New Media troublemaker since 2009, at PJ Media since 2011. He graduated with a degree in English (creative writing emphasis) and political science from Ball State University in 2006. Previously he's also worked as a freelance writer for The Indianapolis Star and the film critic for WTHR.com. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and their Siberian Husky puppy Maura.

Let’s say you’re out drinking with your buddies, things get out of hand, you pull out your smartphone, you take a selfie in the middle of all this drunken revelry, then you take 30 or 40 more, and, without hesitation, you start uploading them to Facebook.

It’s a common thing to do. But Yann LeCun aims to stop such unbridled behavior—or at least warn people when they’re about to do something they might regret. He wants to build a kind of Facebook digital assistant that will, say, recognize when you’re uploading an embarrassingly candid photo of your late-night antics. In a virtual way, he explains, this assistant would tap you on the shoulder and say: “Uh, this is being posted publicly. Are you sure you want your boss and your mother to see this?”

The idea is more than just an idle suggestion. LeCun is the New York University researcher and machine-learning guru who now oversees the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research lab, a team of AI researchers inside the internet giant that spans offices in both California and New York, and this rapidly expanding operation is now laying the basic groundwork for his digital assistant.

Here’s the kicker, emphasis added:

The team’s deep learning algorithms now examine your overall Facebook behavior in an effort to identify the right content for your news feed—content you’re likely to click on—and they’ll soon analyze the text you type into status posts, automatically suggesting relevant hashtags. But LeCun and his team are also looking towards AI systems that can understand Facebook data in more complex ways—and guide you in directions you may not go on your own.

From Business Insider today, a look inside the emotionally manipulative approach driving the company: “Facebook: We Don’t Call Them ‘Users’ Any More, We Call Them ‘People’”:

The company also has an “empathy team” which is charged with helping its engineers and designers understand what it’s actually like to be a user, or a business paying for advertising.

So Facebook built what’s called Custom Audiences, which lets businesses upload their purchase data and identifying information about their customers to Facebook in a hashed, privacy-protected way. Facebook can both use this to let businesses target ads to their existing customers, but also to reference them against who saw ads to prove that impressions on web or mobile, even without clicks, lead to purchases.

Facebook also collects offline purchase data tied to people’s grocery loyalty cards and other identifiers through partners like Datalogix. The point of all this measurement is that when advertisers can see they’re getting a return on investment, they spend more.

“What we’re also saying tough, is that for those who have American children or children who are legal permanent residents, that you can actually register and submit yourself to a criminal background check, pay any back taxes, and commit to paying future taxes. And if you do that you get as a piece of paper that gives you insurance that you can work and live here without fear of deportation.That does not apply to everybody but it does apply to roughly 5 million, about half of what is estimated to be the number of undocumented workers here.

Now, that is a temporary just like DACA, the program that we put in place for young people who were brought here, who otherwise are good citizens, or studying, working, join our military. We did that several years ago where we said it does not make sense for us to subject these young people to a deportation risk. They are Americans in their hearts, even if they don’t have a right piece of paper. That is temporary as well although it’s been subject to renewal.”

Another video excerpt from this townhall puts the president’s emotion-based idea — that one can look into someone’s heart to figure out if they’re an American and should be recognized as such by the federal government — into greater context. On the next page see a video from the same session of the president with one of his famous Bible butcherings:

Just three years ago, Chris Hughes and Sean Eldridge were the toast of the liberal establishment. The Facebook co-founder and his politically ambitious husband embodied all the attributes of a bona fide “gay power couple.” In 2012, Hughes bought The New Republic, rescuing the flagship liberal magazine from financial peril and establishing himself as a player in Washington. At the same time, Eldridge was quietly preparing to run for Congress in upstate New York.

Young, handsome, Ivy League-pedigreed, rich (“the wealthiest openly gay men under 30” according to The Advocate, a stretch considering that the fortune belongs to Hughes), and espousing predictably liberal political views, the Hughes-Eldridge partnership was destined to work wonders for America.

How swiftly things change. In just the past two months, one half of this pair managed to single-handedly destroy a storied journalistic institution, while the other suffered a crushing electoral defeat in New York’s 19th Congressional District. Last week, the 31-year-old Hughes forced the resignations of both the editor and literary editor of The New Republic, whose 100th anniversary he presided over last month at a star-studded gala in Washington, D.C.

In protest of the magazine’s newly ensconced CEO’s plan to transform TNRinto a “vertically integrated digital media company,” the majority of the magazine’s senior and contributing editors resigned.

Weeks before the implosion at TNR, 28-year-old Eldridge lost his congressional bid by a stunning 30 points, despite having outspent his opponent nearly 3-to-1 in a district President Obama won by 6 percentage points. The couple had purchased a $2 million home in the district expressly so that Eldridge could run there, their purchase of a $5 million mansion in the adjoining 18th having come to naught after that seat was won by another gay Democrat in 2012.

When Hughes bought the publication, as the Times story notes, he said he was motivated to purchase it because he had a great interest in “the future of high quality long-form journalism.”

I knew at the time that the result of his takeover would be the magazine’s demise. In a PJ Media column, I wrote: “I am not too optimistic about its future.” At that time, Richard Just was running it; he had just met with Hughes and convinced him to purchase TNR, hoping that he would save the magazine. Shortly thereafter, Hughes fired Just and convinced TNR’s old editor Frank Foer to return as editor-in-chief.

I believed that TNR would become a shill for the Obama administration. This was made clear quite soon…

Hughes recently told reporters that he considered TNR to be not a magazine, but a “vertically integrated digital media company,” perhaps something along the lines of Politico or Buzzfeed. As owner and publisher, he has a right to do what he wants with his money. But he has quickly abandoned the promises he made when he bought TNR, to make the magazine relevant and to continue true to its intellectual traditions.

The current crop of departing editors should not have been surprised at this turn of events. The new course was clear from the very first day Hughes took it over. I recall him announcing that he was going to set up nationwide TNR coffee shops, starting in the major East and West Coast cities, where people could drink coffee and eat pastries and get TNRmugs, shirts, as well as the magazine itself. That crazy idea never came to fruition. But it was a harbinger of things to come.

Here’s Kirchick, really sticking the knife in with his analysis of Hughes’ lucky path to a pile of wealth that he now doesn’t have the skills to use effectively. This explains the silliness of wanting to turn an institution of political journalism into a Starbucks:

Unlike Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, with whom he roomed at Harvard, Hughes had no special programming or coding abilities. But there was a silver lining in this lack of technical expertise, in that, as the only member of this tech geek crew with passable social skills, he could take up the public-relations portfolio. “He is fortunate he found himself in the same room,” David Kirkpatrick, author of a book about the website, told the Times. “He is more socially adjusted than the rest of them.” By his own admission, Hughes’ main job for Facebook was “customer service.” $700 million, the rough amount that Hughes earned when he cashed out of the company in 2007, is a pretty good take for a glorified call-center operator.

Is there a more cuttingmMillennial insult than to compare someone who thinks he’s the next Zuckerberg building something bigger than Facebook to a “a glorified call-center operator”?

Many thanks to Jeff Dunetz at Yid With Lid for his diligence in reminding the world about the truth of the shameful career of Al Sharpton, the baby boomer generation’s most effective and notorious radical activist:

It all started as a rent dispute in the summer of 1995… As he has done so often in his life, Al Sharpton turned this non-racial economic dispute into a racial conflict. …

Soon after the massacre, the Jewish Action Alliance, a New York-based civil-rights group, released audiotapes and transcripts of several of Sharpton’s weekly radio show in which Morris Powell, leader of the 125th Street Vendor’s Association, can be heard using racial and anti-Semitic language to encourage Harlem residents to boycott Freddy’s. Learning from his Crown Heights experience Sharpton let others push the anti-Semitic hatred but it was all done on his show.

….

In court papers filed the day before the fire, Harari and two employees described weeks of protests outside the clothing store. Sharpton’s National Action Network sets up picket lines; customers going into Freddy’s were spat on and cursed as “traitors” and “Uncle Toms.” Some protesters shouted, “Burn down the Jew store!” and simulate striking a match. “We’re going to see that this cracker suffers,” says Sharpton’s colleague Morris Powell.

I think it’s very important to be cognizant of the facts and details of Sharpton’s numerous controversies. His acceptance (and prominence) — on MSNBC, embraced by Obama and Holder — is one of the most irrefutable symbols of the Democratic Party and Progressivism’s moral vacuum. This isn’t a political party that tolerates criminality, it’s a political party run by criminals dedicated to helping and promoting other criminals.

Send them a message they will never forget — and if that message resembles Dresden in World War II, so be it. They have brought it on themselves. We should not take sides in the Neanderthal Sunni-Shiite rift in which they have been killing each other for over a thousand years for pathological cultish reasons. Both sides want nothing more than a caliphate. They just want their caliphate.

And most importantly of all, we should reinstate the economic boycott of Iran even more tightly than it was before while informing the bloody mullahs and the Iranian people that we support regime change now, not pussy-foot around about it as Obama did when the students were marching in the streets of Tehran (the most morally reprehensible behavior by an American president in my lifetime). We can’t allow the mullahs to profit from our dismantling of ISIS. And if they don’t get the message, use lethal force.

I fear that soon ISIS will start upping the ante with their video releases. Beheadings won’t deliver enough shock value for the Game of Thrones postmodern pop culture. What sorts of videos should one expect next to terrorize Americans? Look at Rotherham to see another ancient method of warfare adapted for today…

While followers of the White House are aware of Jarrett’s sway as the president’s closest consigliere, the extent of this closeness is somewhat staggering based on “Blood Feud.” Klein writes that Jarrett was more powerful than Rahm Emanuel and William Daley, the president’s first chiefs of staff — in fact according to Klein she is the most powerful presidential adviser since Harry Hopkins of FDR’s White House. Jarrett is so close to the Obamas that she reportedly “moved permanently into a room in the family’s private quarters, referred to by the White House staff as “the Residence.”

Jarrett’s nickname as “the nightstalker” — which she acquired for her habit of following the President and first lady back to their private quarters — seemed innocuous. But this goes to a whole other level of creepy, so much so I have a hard time believing it’s true until more sources back it up. Could Jarrett have really been living with the first couple for Obama’s whole presidency and the story is just now getting out? Or did she not move in until after the second term started?

Is there any time in history a supposed “senior adviser” has actually moved into the first family’s private quarters? What’s actually goingon here?

Concluding with an introduction to one of the next subjects of my writing and research, which ties together the themes of all 30 books with Jarrett and Michelle Obama’s favorite TV show…

Jason L. Riley’s book was number 15 on the list and I explained why and featured an excerpt here. Really make a point to read this book and to send copies to your friends and family who are still making the world worse by voting Democrats into office to maintain the failed polices and cultural values that have wrought such pain, crime, and poverty for generations.

After summarizing some of the points from the books and their real-world impact in the administration’s policies, I concluded:

Sitting here on this Sunday morning before the election, the Sun now up, reflecting back on these years scouring through dusty old Marxist books, trying to understand a president who built his career on a mountain of lies, I confess a peace with either electoral result on Tuesday. A part of me almost wishes that Obama steals wins reelection (as I anticipate he will). The thought of him quietly retiring to a mansion in Hawaii in January to live out the rest of his life in comfort and adoration should inspire nausea. Only if Obama wins reelection do conservatives have a chance to hold him accountable for Benghazi, Fast and Furious, and all the crimes we don’t even know about yet. The man has blood on his hands and we can’t let him get away with it.

An ancient dictum popularized in recent years by the late Christopher Hitchens on the path forward, should Tuesday disappoint:

Fiat justitia ruat caelum

Do Justice and Let the Skies Fall

Over the course of 2013 my views evolved about who seemed to really be making the decisions at the White House. By January this year I began arguing that Obama’s mentor, Valerie Jarrett, was the real power-broker and the one responsible for most of the terrible policies that the administration implemented. From my article “Welcome to Single Mom Nation: In 2014 Acknowledge the Matriarchs Who Really Run America,” where I presented some of the evidence and my conclusions:

Now we know that actually Jarrett was the one with the political savvy who was grooming Obama all along so that she could use him to implement her agenda. Obama is just her mask…

My prediction: when the history books are written the real decision-maker will start to emerge more fully as Jarrett. As people try and make sense of an administration adrift they’ll start to realize that this is a federal government essentially being run by two single moms pulling the strings of the performer son of a single mom with a basic goal of just trying to make America a less “mean” place for other single moms. It’s a matriarchal administration running on emotion and instinct, like a mother crocodile snapping to protect her eggs. This is what happens when a culture that rejects the importance of the Judeo-Christian, nuclear family model takes control of the Democratic Party and the federal government…

President Jarrett has been so successful because she has implemented the most effective of Saul Alinsky’s Chicago gangster community organizing tactics at the national level. (And centrist-corporatist Clinton narcissist Democrats in the primaries and neoconservative-corporatist boomer Republicans in the general elections didn’t even realize what hit them.)

Conservatives should strive to defeat Jarrett the same way that the feds eventually managed to get her ideological predecessor, Al Capone: not for the big crimes but for the small ones like tax evasion. Activists should aspire to discover conclusive, bulletproof evidence of acts she has engaged in which would force her to fall from power, no longer able to implement her across-the-board policies of American weakness.

So of course I’m thrilled with the approach my friend Ben Shapiro chose for his new book, which I’ve recently finished reading. Rather than continue to see the Democrats merely as a rival political party with differing solutions for public policy problems, Ben puts Left vs Right aside and instead makes the case for criminal prosecution of individual members of the Obama administration, structuring each chapter with opening and closing arguments:

One of the biggest mistakes that I’ve observed in so many activists over the years is seeing politics and ideology as the end-all-be-all of how to fix the world. A certain mentality seems to predominate amongst many activists and writers that creates a tunnel vision. If we can just elect the right people and pass the right laws then we can fix America’s problems. Campaigning and activism arise as the paramount solutions.

But sometimes they’re not. Political opponents who embrace the legitimacy of America’s political traditions can be defeated through superior campaign tactics and more inspiring candidates. But criminal organizations willing to subvert the rule of law and do anything to maintain power — like let Americans die at terrorists’ hands rather than look bad during an election, like use the IRS to muzzle and harass opponents, like distribute guns to a Mexican drug cartel in order to further gun control legislation — cannot. The game has been rigged and trying to win it is as foolhardy as playing Monopoly against someone pocketing $500s from the bank when you’re not looking.

The realization that I hope more activists are starting to make as we round the corner into the last fourth of Obama’s presidency: the Democratic Party isn’t a political party that allies with criminals, it’s a criminal organization that has hijacked a political party. Ben lays out the evidence on 7 crimes, any of which individually would have been more than enough to impeach any other president unprotected by a friendly media.

Part of the reason why I agree with Ben’s thesis so strongly is that I’ve continued reading so many other books on related topics that support it, revealing misunderstood concepts in politics, culture, and history. Here’s a list of some of them that are most on my mind this summer as I continue to piece together the tactics and historical predecessors of the criminal organization that’s conned its way into the White House. Some of these are new books just released that I’m reading for the first time, others have been out for years and I’m just getting to them, and some are ones that I’ve already read and am returning to again to read more closely and to guide future research. For each book I’ll explain in brief why it’s a useful piece of the puzzle for understanding an aspect of how our government has been subverted by lifelong, committed activists who do not care if Rule of Law stands in the way of implementing their egalitarian fantasies.

Here’s an index of the 29 more books introduced here in support of shifting to a criminal justice approach rather than an ideological activist protest in the twilight of the Jarrett-Obama presidency; I would encourage you to jump to whichever subject or author interests you most:

As we start shifting in the coming months to increasing the quantity of content at PJ Lifestyle I’m going to start doing a weekly summary linking to everything and offering a few comments to encourage others to start following the work of these unique writers.

Monday, June 24

Last week in the central Pennsylvania hamlet of St. Marys, a 25-year-old man named Joshua Lee Coffey did what no 25-year-old man who is still living with his mother should ever do: he expressed his dislike for the dinner she served him. It was pork, you see, and as a pious convert to Islam, Coffey considered pork unclean, and his mother inconsiderate for having served it.

But “inconsiderate” is understated. A war of words escalated quickly – at least as far as young Coffey was concerned. He complained to his mother that she was trying to “poison” him with the pork, reminding her that Islam forbade the consumption of The Other White Meat. His fury rising, he soon threatened to kill her, as well as her boyfriend, Mark Blair, who was also present for the fateful pork dinner.

Thursday, June 27

Thursdays we try and aim for more of a geek culture theme. Last week Charlie really established his science bonafides beyond dispute IMHO with this debut Thursday science geek article. It’s essential reading to grasp the science behind what the NSA is actually doing.

The other three geek culture posts of the day — Theme Park Geek Chris Queen’s River Country memorial, Video Game Geek Walter Hudson’s thoughts on the challenges of a Superman video game, and Gearhead Car Geek Becky Graebner’s ongoing skepticism of electric vehicles — are a bit less disturbing than the realization that the government really is spying on us all. Stephen Green also had some great tech geek posts on Microsoft and Apple.

Saturday, June 29

On Saturday we’ve got three different approaches to self-improvement. Charlie Martin has another installment of his health and weight loss 13 Weeks regimen. Rhonda Robinson announces the start of her weekly efforts at budgeting and increasing family revenue. And Sarah Hoyt continues her plans to maximize her creative organization — advice for freelancer and everyone who works from home continues.

As we start shifting in the coming months to increasing the quantity of content at PJ Lifestyle I’m going to start doing a weekly summary linking to everything and offering a few comments to encourage others to start following the work of these unique writers.

Monday

Monday’s lead articles strive to focus on family and parenting issues.

Each week at PJ Lifestyle Robert Spencer applies his deep understanding of Islam to exploring how the Muslim family model differs from the Western style of parenting. This week he explains some of the problems with Dinesh D’Souza’s efforts to woo “socially conservative” Muslims.

This article is another effort from me to blend two rival subcultures together. I explain why the secular/science/futurist minded need to listen to the Bible thumpers if they want to have any hope of their space colonies surviving. Humans can — and will — colonize the cosmos over the course of this century. But to get there we need to pursue it with the same attitudes as the religious radicals who colonized America — with Bible in hand.

One of the new hobbies I’ve explored this spring: hummingbird watching.

Tuesday

On Tuesdays we’re going to begin exploring more international and regional perspectives on culture. The Canadian Kathy Shaidle and British Theodore Dalrymple will set the focus but in coming months PJ Lifestyle will feature additional perspectives reporting on culture and lifestyle from around the country and the globe…

Kathy Shaidle begins a new series exploring the fascinating — and sometimes downright bizarre — ideas of author and former media mogul Conrad Black. Part 2, coming tomorrow is fascinating. Kathy explains how the very pro-American and generally conservative Black still defends FDR in spite of Amity Shlaes’s scholarship.

My friend Dave Forsmark usually reviews books for PJ Lifestyle but last week he teamed with a friend to make the case for how to use technology to dramatically reduce the ability of criminals to scam the government.

Chris is my partner in Disney fanaticism. After he submitted this one it occurred to me that in the coming years with Disney’s recent purchase of all things Star Wars that he should collaborate with Walter Hudson, our resident Star Wars philosopher. I emailed them both on Wednesday and urged my friends to get their heads together.

Thursday

Thursdays aim to explore various aspects of “geek culture.” Chris Queen focuses on DisneyWorld and theme park news, Walter keeps up on video game news. Other writers will start in the coming weeks and months.

With the death of James Gandolfini after years of drug abuse I’m reminded of this post I wrote at the beginning of June commending Philip Seymour Hoffman for checking into rehab after falling back into addiction

I remember getting into an argument with one of the commenters who insisted that celebrities should NOT be praised for seeking help in treating their addictions…

I still haven’t seen Man of Steel yet but sympathize with Stephen’s points. With my wife in the Bahamas this month on an art trip my usual moviegoing companion has not been available. Perhaps we’ll see a matinee this weekend — she gets back on Friday, finally.

This article from Walter’s Video Games, Villains and Values series seemed an appropriate one to think about again on this Zombie themed day. Here are the others, which I plan to collect soon into another compilation:

Saturday

Charlie Martin and Sarah Hoyt are the leaders of Self-Improvement Saturday. They’re developing the 13 Weeks Method, figuring out how to use technology and New Media to track life changes. I plan to join them in coming weeks as I get back into more diligence with my 13 Weeks Radical Reading Regimen.

After 13 weeks of novel writing advice Sarah decided to expand her focus for the next season. Now she’s developing a method for all creative homebound workers. Here’s how to start to get organized to create.

Mea culpa: this post from Paula, expanding on her article two weeks ago on the push to inspire another Great Awakening of religious belief was meant for publication on Sunday afternoon instead of Saturday. But I goofed and scheduled it a day early so it was a lead-in to religion-themed Sunday… I won’t make that mistake again. Hopefully.

Maura at the park on Sunday.

Sunday

Sundays will explore religion from a variety of perspectives and traditions. Susan L.M. Goldberg is currently analyzing popular culture through her lens of Biblical Feminism and P. David Hornik contemplates the balance of sacred and secular from his perspective in Israel. In the future I’ll present collections of some of the articles they’ve written over the last six month — both are really developing some rich themes.

I’ve resisted this for awhile. The past three years I’ve readily identified as an ideologically conservative, pro-Tea Party, ex-leftist. But I resisted joining the Republican Party, preferring to focus on the war of ideas, the battles of Left and Right, Marxist vs Classical Liberal, rather than Democrat vs Republican.

When Mitt Romney secured the nomination I naively thought, “well, he’s got that corporate competence. Surely they’ll be as smart at growing a campaign as they would building a business, right? Even if they can’t articulate Americanism at least they’ll maximize on the basics of Get Out the Vote and fundraising and all the boring, professional stuff, right?”

The story of how monumental a failure Project ORCA was on Election Day was first reported by a volunteer, John Ekdahl, on the Ace of Spades blog. After tweeting the article, I was contacted by several other volunteers who were eager to explain in greater detail just how many things went wrong with Project Orca on Tuesday.

I spoke with one volunteer in a rural Virginia county who had a similar experience to the blogger on Ace’s site. Shoshanna McCrimmon signed up to volunteer on Romney’s website several months ago. She was contacted by Dan Centinello of the Romney campaign and underwent online and phone training that lasted for several hours in order to volunteer locally on Election Day. Because of secrecy concerns, the application itself was inaccessible until the morning of the election. From the outset there were failures of organization.

…..

Was ORCA’s failure the reason why Romney lost Virginia by almost 116,000 votes, Ohio by 103,000, Iowa by 88,000 or why Florida is still, days later, too close to call? It’s impossible to know what a Romney campaign with working GOTV technology would have been able to accomplish. Ekdahl explained that with the failure of Project ORCA’s organization and its later meltdown on Election Day “30,000+ of the most active and fired-up volunteers were wandering around confused and frustrated when they could have been doing anything else to help. Like driving people to the polls, phone-banking, walking door-to-door, etc.” The possibility that all of the efforts of Romney’s campaign, all of the enthusiasm, went unharnessed and dormant on Election Day when they could’ve at least led to a closer election result, if not a victory, is becoming beyond frustrating for thousands of his staffers, for the millions of Americans who gave their time and money to elect Mitt Romney president as they come to learn just what a disaster ORCA seems to have been.

This is my tipping point. Will it be for anyone else?

1. Today I’m joining the Republican Party because I recognize that it’s not enough to take back the culture. We could spend four years pushing the culture and expanding the base and then it would be all for naught because incompetent GOP establishment hacks cannot run a campaign.

3. Today I’m joining the Republican Party because as I’ve returned to Bible-based religion and a faith in God during the past year I’ve come to understand the story of the ancient Israelites rebelling against slavery and idolatry as the basis for Western Civilization, our ancestors’ flight from Europe, and the founding of this nation. The Republican Party was founded as the anti-slavery Party. It still is today.

Yesterday, Conor Friedersdorf, a staff writer at The Atlantic and protege of Andrew Sullivan, offered an explanation for why he chose to spend months blasting Mitt Romney as more evil than Barack Obama but will still vote for Gary Johnson instead. He titled the piece “Why I Refuse to Vote for Barack Obama“:

Tell certain liberals and progressives that you can’t bring yourself to vote for a candidate who opposes gay rights, or who doesn’t believe in Darwinian evolution, and they’ll nod along. Say that you’d never vote for a politician caught using the ‘n’-word, even if you agreed with him on more policy issues than his opponent, and the vast majority of left-leaning Americans would understand. But these same people cannot conceive of how anyone can discern Mitt Romney’s flaws, which I’ve chronicled in the course of the campaign, and still not vote for Obama.

Don’t they see that Obama’s transgressions are worse than any I’ve mentioned?

I don’t see how anyone who confronts Obama’s record with clear eyes can enthusiastically support him. I do understand how they might concluded that he is the lesser of two evils, and back him reluctantly, but I’d have thought more people on the left would regard a sustained assault on civil liberties and the ongoing, needless killing of innocent kids as deal-breakers.

Nope.

Emphases added. In the first three paragraphs Friedersdorf references himself five times — all without need.

How much more does Friedersdorf talk about himself as he lays out the case that the death of 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki (in the drone strike that killed his Jihadi father) morally disqualifies Obama from a second term in office? The 1798-word piece contains 35 variations of I. Among the most narcissistic passages:

If I vote, it will be for Johnson. What about the assertion that Romney will be even worse than Obama has been on these issues? It is quite possible, though not nearly as inevitable as Democrats seem to think. It isn’t as though they accurately predicted the abysmal behavior of Obama during his first term, after all. And how do you get worse than having set a precedent for the extrajudicial assassination of American citizens? By actually carrying out such a killing? Obama did that too. Would Romney? I honestly don’t know. I can imagine he’d kill more Americans without trial and in secret, or that he wouldn’t kill any. I can imagine that he’d kill more innocent Pakistani kids or fewer. His rhetoric suggests he would be worse. I agree with that. Then again, Romney revels in bellicosity; Obama soothes with rhetoric and kills people in secret.

One should also note that in his explanation for why not to vote for Obama the only killings that Friedersdorf mentions as a concern to him are those done by America to defend itself. So little surprise that he never gets around to the question of which candidate will do a better job protecting American lives.

The Obama administration, George Soros, the International Monetary Fund, and liberal opinion in general believe that no crisis should be wasted: an enlightened supranational bureaucracy should emerge as the ruler of Europe.

I find this repulsive for the most elemental of reasons: the further that government is removed from the electorate, the more prone it is to abuse. The Brussels bureaucracy is responsible for the catastrophe in the first place, and one doesn’t normally give the gasoline monopoly to a bunch of arsonists.

As an old investment banker, though, I think that consolidating all the European scams into supranational entities will fail disastrously. The lifeboat itself will sink under the weight. Some of the scams are simply too outrageous to be rescued. The same Keynesian quackery that has kept the US in recession for the past four years festers among the Eurocrats.

Last week, I went on Al Sharpton’s MSNBC show PoliticsNation to talk about extremism in the Republican Party. As a socially liberal Republican, this happens to be a topic I know a lot about. On the show, I told Sharpton that many Republicans treat me like a freak, especially the extreme-right members of my party. I went on to say that I don’t understand the appeal of extreme bloggers such as Michelle Malkin and the late Andrew Breitbart.

Going on Al Sharpton’s show to talk about “extremism in the Republican Party” is as offensive as appearing on a David Duke program to talk about fire safety and tying proper knots. Last summer Jeff Dunetz at Yid With Lid remembered the 10 year anniversary of the Crown Heights riots, an antisemitic pogrom provoked by the MSNBC host and Democratic Party consigliere who earns kinder words from McCain than the “extreme bloggers” who tweet things she doesn’t like.

**OBAMA COLUMBIA DOCUMENT RELEASED**

Breitbart News’ discovery of the 1991 biography distributed by Barack Obama’s then-literary agency, which stated (incorrectly) that Obama had been “born in Kenya,” confirmed what we have been saying for months as we pursued “The Vetting” project. Much of what the country ought to know about Obama, but does not, is hidden–often in plain sight–yet the mainstream media covers it up or spins it away to protect him.

The errant biography is only the most sensational example of a pattern of behavior in which Obama and his supporters manipulate or even fabricate his life story. And because Obama and his campaign have refused to provide other, relevant facts–and because the mainstream media shows such little interest in finding them–conspiracy theories flourish.

Some of these are easily debunked by conducting some very basic research.

The image above–never before released–is from public records at Columbia University that prove that Obama did, in fact, graduate in 1983 from the Ivy League school. Contrary to some conspiracy theories, Obama was a student within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences–not the less selective, “nontraditional” Columbia University School of General Studies (which only merged with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 1990).

While he was alive Andrew Breitbart rarely got the credit he deserved for standing up to the conspiracy fringe. In 2010 he took a stand against two ghosts of Conservatism Past: Birtherism (the contemporary expression of John Birch Society paranoia) and homophobia.

Vetting Barack Obama means more than just unearthing new documents from the President’s lifelong journey through the hidden corners of American socialism. The task also requires carrying Breitbart’s legacy of diligence in confronting the narratives advanced by those with less sincere motives. (How come we’ve seen conspiracy theories gain so much traction in the age of the internet? Because it’s a great business model. Conspiracy theories are second only to sex on the list of subjects guaranteed to generate web traffic.)

And so in 2012 Pollak and Ben Shapiro, John Nolte, Dana Loesch, Mike Flynn, Larry O’Connor, and the rest of the Breitbart News team follow their founder’s lead and provide an example of what it means to be journalists first, activists second: Just telling the truth about your political opponent’s history, record of expressed views, and character of the men he proclaims his mentors is more effective than trying to drop a “gotcha” story (like about cutting a gay teen’s hair against his will 50 years ago…)

But the real challenge is getting people to care once the facts are staring them in the face about the nature of who this President has chosen to empower.

President Barack Obama is continuing his love affair with Turkish Islamist leader Recep Erdogan. As Erdogan continues to undermine Turkish democracy, throw hundreds of moderates into jail, destroy the nation’s institutions, help Iran, throw hysterical tantrums about how much he hates Israel, promote Islamism in the region, and is fresh from still another meeting with Hamas leaders, Obama continues to use Erdogan as his guru.

When the two men met at the Seoul, South Korea, Nuclear Security Summit on March 25, Obama practically slobbered over the anti-American ruler, calling Erdogan his “friend and colleague….We find ourselves in frequent agreement upon a wide range of issues.”

When Erdogan goes to elections or is criticized by the opposition he uses statements like this to “prove” that his policies aren’t radical or anti-Western at all. Here’s a man whose regime can help terrorist groups organize a violent confrontation with Israel, preside over a virulently anti-American media, insist Iran isn’t seeking nuclear weapons and has a wonderful government, and then be lionized by the president of the United States.

Obama adds:

“I think it’s fair to say that over the last several years, the relationship between Turkey and the United States has continued to grow across every dimension. And I find Prime Minister Erdogan to be an outstanding partner and an outstanding friend on a wide range of issues.”

“The point I was making was not that Grandmother harbors any racial animosity. She doesn’t. But she is a typical white person, who, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn’t know, you know, there’s a reaction that’s been bred in our experiences that don’t go away and that sometimes come out in the wrong way, and that’s just the nature of race in our society.”

In Afrolantica Legacies Derrick Bell utilized many occult themes — from racializing the legend of Atlantis, to extraterrestrial encounters with the sexy alien goddess Chiara, to a continued reliance on conspiracy theories, the man who blurbed books by both Louis Farrakhan and Barack Obama knew his esoterica.

And in Bell’s follow-up we understand why. After a small radical publisher released Afrolantica Legacies in 1998 a more mainstream, respectable house — Bloomsbury — blessed the world with his next book in 2002, Ethical Ambition: Living a Life of Meaning and Worth. The chapter on spirituality includes the passage in the above illustration.

Bell rejected the principles of ethical monotheism that make up the foundation of the Judeo-Christian tradition and its political expression in classical liberalism. Instead of understanding human nature as flawed and man as separated from God he embraced the Gnostic conception: “To know self at the deepest level, they believed, is to know God.”

The practical result of this is self-worship, a form of idolatry and the practice the second of the 10 Commandments confronted.

My previous blogging series explored Critical Race Theory founder Derrick Bell’s Afrolantica Legacies and its connections to current events and the Obama administration’s public policies.

Bell was born in 1930, and his generation would go on to lead the ’60s campus revolts and the various components of the New Left. (See Ron Radosh’s memoir Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left for the stories of Bell’s radical peers.) By the early 1970s this Silent Generation cohort produced not only their pivotal works (Bell’s Race, Racism and American Law came in 1973) but also the children who would some day gain the name Generation X.

Touré was born in 1971, and now 40 years later you can read how his generation of writer-activists has updated Bell’s political theology.

My motives for reading Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness remain as selfish as for Afrolantica Legacies: I want to know “what it means to be black now.” Or rather: who counts as black today? Do those with one African-American and one Caucasian parent count as black? What about one grandparent?

What do those in multi-racial families need to know in order to raise the next generation of mixed race children? How do you explain “blackness” and “whiteness” to a child who falls into neither category?

Ann Coulter quotes from the book Negroes With Guns by Robert F. Williams in her column recounting the courageous battles Southern blacks fought to defend themselves against the KKK with the help of the National Rifle Association:

In the preface to “Negroes With Guns,” Williams writes: “I have asserted the right of Negroes to meet the violence of the Ku Klux Klan by armed self-defense — and have acted on it. It has always been an accepted right of Americans, as the history of our Western states proves, that where the law is unable, or unwilling, to enforce order, the citizens can, and must act in self-defense against lawless violence.”

Senior Fellow Eric Boehlert, one of the faces of the organization, has a dicey record when it comes to Israel and the Jews. On September 11, 2001, he wrote a piece for Salon.com defending American Muslims from the supposed anti-Muslim hysteria brewing. In that piece, he recounted a Muslim rally in Paterson, New Jersey:

“We won’t rest until all the Jews are dead,” said a burly young man. “Shame on America,” said another bitter-faced youth. “For helping Israel to kill Palestinians,” said a third.

In the wake of the WTC attacks, however, those brash sentiments were muted.

“We won’t rest until all the Jews are dead” is not a “brash sentiment.” It is open genocidal anti-Semitism. But not to Eric Boehlert, apparently.

Boehlert’s bias in favor of anti-Jewish terrorists didn’t stop there. In 2002, he wrote a piece for Salon.com in which he lamented the fate of Professor Sami Al-Arian, former North American head of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. This is the same Al-Arian who proclaimed, “God cursed those who are sons of Israel … Those people, God made monkeys and pigs … Let us damn America, let us damn Israel, let us damn them and their allies until death.” When Al-Arian was suspended from his teaching post at Florida Atlantic University, Boehlert defended Al-Arian as an “innocent professor.”

In Professor Derrick Bell’s Afrolantica Legacies, his chapter “Shadowboxing: Blacks, Jews, and Games Scapegoats Play” defended and downplayed the antisemitism of Nation of Islam cult leader Louis Farrakhan. Similarly, President Barack Obama describes Recep Erdogan, the Islamist, antisemitic leader of Turkey as, a “friend and colleague….We find ourselves in frequent agreement upon a wide range of issues.” And of course, we have to continue to remind on the subject of a certain video tape that’s racking up quite a late fee:

As a transition from my previous series on Afrolantica Legacies to the next sequence of blogging on political books and their relation to current events, consider this excerpt from The Derrick Bell Readerin which the founder of Critical Race Theory defines the controversial term.

Just as important as what Bell says is how he says it. “Who’s Afraid of Critical Race Theory?” is a familiar formulation, that intentionally inspires readers to imagine the ideology — and those who promote it — as a wolf.

From March 19 through April 13 I blogged through Afrolantica Legacies, analyzing the arguments and connecting them with current events in the political culture. This compilation collects and re-edits those 21 posts. It’s 9800 words and features more than 30 photographic excerpts from the book.

The myth of the rise and fall of Afrolantica — a kind of Atlantis where only African Americans can live — opens the book and provides Bell with a way to tie together his essays, fictional dialogues, and political parables written through the ’80s and ’90s. From seven of these essays, Bell extracts these principles to serve as “rules of racial preservation”:

This is how Derrick Bell concludes Afrolantica Legacies, a final discussion with the idealized female version of himself, Geneva Crenshaw:

“Let’s get back to the struggle” are the final words in a book in which Bell has:

A) Named his utopia “Afrolantica” and decreed it a land where only African-Americans could survive. Thus, in Bell’s imagination utopia is a world without Jews. Bell described the sensation of living in such a place “a euphoria of Freedom.”

What were these men, scattered across cultures but united in antisemitism, struggling with “inside ones self”? Warning: the graphic answer on the next page quotes from material containing profanity and disturbing content.

The last of Derrick Bell’s Afrolantica Legacies explicitly labels the law professor’s life program as a faith:

To illustrate his political dogma, Bell uses another literary reference. He titles the essay “Bluebeard’s Castle: An American Fairy Tale” and borrows Bela Bartok’s opera. The plot summarized via Wikipedia:

Judith and Bluebeard arrive at his castle, which is all dark. Bluebeard asks Judith if she wants to stay and even offers her an opportunity to leave, but she decides to stay. Judith insists that all the doors be opened, to allow light to enter into the forbidding interior, insisting further that her demands are based on her love for Bluebeard. Bluebeard refuses, saying that they are private places not to be explored by others, and asking Judith to love him but ask no questions. Judith persists, and eventually prevails over his resistance.

The first door opens to reveal a torture chamber, stained with blood. Repelled, but then intrigued, Judith pushes on. Behind the second door is a storehouse of weapons, and behind the third a storehouse of riches. Bluebeard urges her on. Behind the fourth door is a secret garden of great beauty; behind the fifth, a window onto Bluebeard’s vast kingdom. All is now sunlit, but blood has stained the riches, watered the garden, and grim clouds throw blood-red shadows over Bluebeard’s kingdom.

Bluebeard pleads with her to stop: the castle is as bright as it can get, and will not get any brighter, but Judith refuses to be stopped after coming this far, and opens the penultimate sixth door, as a shadow passes over the castle. This is the first room that has not been somehow stained with blood; a silent silvery lake is all that lies within, “a lake of tears”. Bluebeard begs Judith to simply love him, and ask no more questions. The last door must be shut forever. But she persists, asking him about his former wives, and then accusing him of having murdered them, suggesting that their blood was the blood everywhere, that their tears were those that filled the lake, and that their bodies lie behind the last door. At this, Bluebeard hands over the last key.

Behind the door are Bluebeard’s three former wives, but still alive, dressed in crowns and jewellery. They emerge silently, and Bluebeard, overcome with emotion, prostrates himself before them and praises each in turn, finally turning to Judith and beginning to praise her as his fourth wife. She is horrified, begs him to stop, but it is too late. He dresses her in the jewellery they wear, which she finds exceedingly heavy. Her head drooping under the weight, she follows the other wives along a beam of moonlight through the seventh door. It closes behind her, and Bluebeard is left alone as all fades to total darkness.

For his essay Bell casts America as Bluebeard and black Americans as Judith. Then he labels all the great Civil Rights victories (the Emancipation Proclamation, the post-Civil War Amendments to the Constitution, desegregation, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965) as akin to doors in Bluebeard’s castle: false improvements leading toward a truth too evil to comprehend.

The previous chapters revealed Afrolantica Legacies’ reliance on a conspiracy theory world view. In the second chapter’s Marxist parable of the Citadel, Derrick Bell imagined a conspiracy to allow the advancement of a handful of “lowlanders” in order to deceive the masses. In the third chapter Bell defends the antisemitic conspiracy theorist Louis Farrakhan and advances his own version of the “Jews control the economy and will run you out of business if they want to” conspiracy. And yesterday the excerpt from the fifth chapter showed Bell’s embrace of Robert L. Allen’s conspiracy theory that whites in America had effectively “colonized” the black community, installing fake black leaders who would actually sabotage black interests.

For the sixth Afrolantica Legacy Bell goes all in on imaginary conspiracies.

Bell titles his Critical Race Theory fiction “The Black Sedition Papers” and describes a plot to use a series of studies by various “race traitors” to blame black Americans for their proletariat class status:

“Under the ground rules, the papers are to focus on black pathology, describing it in detail and condemning those afflicted with it.”

In the essay’s conclusion, Bell imagines an academic friend investigating the Black Sedition Papers conspiracy and reporting back to him on a text suspected of being part of the evil white scheme. He then lays out the strategy I’ve employed in this analysis of Afrolantica Legacies.

Following his full-throated defense of the Stalinist singer Paul Robeson, Derrick Bell chose to provide another icon with a less flattering portrayal. To illustrate the fifth Afrolantica Legacy, Bell borrowed Margaret Atwood’s “classic” 1986 Marxist feminist-dystopian novel The Handmaiden’s Tale. Throughout the essay Bell compares Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall to the novel’s protagonist Offred, a women kept as a sex slave in a nightmare future.

He does this to demonstrate that even though — in his view — Marshall’s Civil Rights victories failed to lift up black Americans, and even though racism will endure forever, we should keep up the hope like the hero of the novel and carry on in the “struggle” regardless because:

From Page 130 Bell embraces the thesis of Robert L. Allen’s 1969 book Black Awakening in Capitalist America:

“… what we deem as progress measured by the number of blacks who have moved into management level positions, is quite similar to developments in colonial Africa and India. The colonizing countries maintained their control by establishing class divisions within the ranks of the indigenous peoples. A few able (and safe) individuals were permitted to move up in the ranks where they served as false symbols of what was possible for the subordinated masses.”

The left often has a simplistic view of the civil rights movement as monolithic. The truth is that Marshall and King represented very different approaches to ending the bitter history of segregation. Marshall favored using the law while King favored bold demonstrations to gain media attention.

History tells us that both the demonstrators and the lawyers played vital roles in bringing about the end of segregation in America. But Marshall’s more conservative view of how to create lasting social change is often forgotten because he never wore a dashiki or patronized the idea of race riots as helpful to achieving racial equality. He was seen by many of the 60’s activists as a boring, law and order, establishment judge who deeply believed in the Constitution, loved America and was a social conservative.

Following the long defense of Louis Farrakhan’s antisemitism in the previous chapter, Derrick Bell presents an essay illustrating the fourth Afrolantica Legacy, another of the dogmas in his political religion:

For his proletariat martyr Bell names one of the saints of the faith. His title: “Paul Robeson: Doing the State Some Service.”

Here’s an excerpt from page 111:

There’s something chilling about Bell arranging his chapters in this way. The previous essay “Shadowboxing: Blacks, Jews and Games Scapegoats Play” defended Louis Farrakhan and denied his antisemitism. Now in this chapter Bell holds up the Stalinist icon Paul Robeson as “one of our greatest heroes.”

In June 1949, during the 150th anniversary celebration of the birth of Alexander Pushkin, Robeson visited the Soviet Union on a major tour including a concert at Tchaikovsky Hall. Concerned about the welfare of Jewish artists, Robeson insisted to Soviet officials that he meet with Itzik Feffer a few days earlier.[14] Robeson had first met Feffer on July 8, 1943, at the largest pro-Soviet rally ever held in the United States, an event organized by the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and chaired by Albert Einstein. Robeson then also got to know Solomon Mikhoels, the popular actor and director of the Moscow State Jewish Theater. Mikhoels also headed the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in the Soviet Union with Feffer as his second. After the rally, Robeson and his wife Essie had entertained Feffer and Mikhoels.

According to an account by Paul Robeson Jr told to Robeson biographer Martin Duberman,[15] in the 1980s, Robeson was disturbed as to why he could not find his many Jewish friends when he returned to the U.S.S.R. in June 1949. After several inquires, Feffer was brought to Robeson’s hotel room by the State Police. He and Feffer were forced to communicate through hand gestures and notes because the room was bugged. Feffer indicated that Mikhoels had been murdered in 1948 by the secret police[16] and intimated that he also was going to be killed. Feffer in fact was executed along with 14 other Jewish intellectuals three years later.[17]

…

Upon returning to the United States, he denied any persecution of Jews and other political prisoners, stating that he “met Jewish people all over the place… I heard no word about it.”[17] Historians Martin Duberman, Philip S Foner, Marie Seton, Paul Robeson Jr and Lloyd Brown concur that Robeson had a long standing mistrust of the US government and that he felt that criticism of the Soviet Union’s internal affairs by someone of his immense international popularity would only serve to shore up reactionary elements in the U.S. .[28] Robeson is on record numerous times as stating that he felt the existence of a major socialist power like the USSR was a bulwark against Western European capitalist domination of Africa, Asia and the Caribbean.

According to Joshua Rubenstein’s book, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom, Robeson also justified his silence on the grounds that any public criticism of the USSR would reinforce the authority of anti-Soviet elements in the United States which, he believed, wanted a preemptive war against the Soviet Union.[28] A large number of Robeson biographers, including Martin Duberman, Philip S Foner, Marie Seton, Paul Robeson Jr and Lloyd Brown also concur with Robeson’s own words, that he felt that criticism of the Soviet Union by someone of his immense international popularity would only serve to shore up reactionary elements in the U.S., the same elements that had lifted his passport, blocked anti-lynching legislation, and maintained a racial climate in the United States that also allowed Jim Crow, impoverished living conditions for all races and a white supremacist domination of the US government to continue.

And recall in the previous Afrolantica post, one of my translations of a statement by progressive Jews who Bell had quoted to try and mask his antisemitism: “Translation: defending the progressive faith is more important than defending the Jewish faith. When the two conflict, Jews should embrace the former.”